MMIDA Revision Flashcards

Marketing Management Tasks

  • Develop market strategies and plans.
  • Capture marketing insights.
  • Connect with customers.
  • Build strong brands.
  • Shape market offerings.
  • Deliver value.
  • Communicate value.
  • Create long-term growth.

What is Marketing Management?

  • Marketing management is the art and science of choosing target markets and getting, keeping, and growing customers through creating, delivering, and communicating superior customer value (Philip Kotler).
  • Kotler and Keller define it as the development, design, and implementation of marketing programs, processes, and activities that recognize the breadth and interdependencies of the business environment.

Core Marketing Concepts

  • Needs, wants, and demands.
  • Target markets, positioning, segmentation.
  • Offerings and brands.
  • Value and satisfaction.
  • Marketing channels.
  • Supply chain.
  • Competition.
  • Marketing environment.

Understanding the Marketplace and Customer Needs

  • Needs are states of felt deprivation.
    • 5 Types of Needs:
      • Stated needs
      • Real needs
      • Unstated needs
      • Delight needs
      • Secret needs
  • Wants are the form human needs take as they are shaped by culture and individual personality.
  • Demands are human wants that are backed by buying power.
  • Market offerings are some combination of products, services, information, or experiences offered to a market to satisfy a need or want.
  • Marketing myopia is the mistake of paying more attention to the specific products a company offers than to the benefits and experiences produced by these products.
    • Example: A company so focused on quick sales and mass production of goods loses sight of its long-term goals and customer needs.

Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning

  • Segmentation
    • Identify and profile distinct groups of buyers who might prefer or require varying product and service mixes by examining demographic, psychographic, and behavioral differences among buyers.
  • Target Markets
    • The marketer decides which segments present the greatest opportunities.
  • Positioning
    • Develops a market offering that it positions in the minds of the target buyers as delivering some central benefit(s).

Marketing Philosophy: Company Orientations Towards the Marketplace

  • The production concept
  • The product concept
  • The selling concept
  • The marketing concept
  • The societal marketing concept

Holistic Marketing Dimensions

  • Internal Marketing: Senior Management, Other Departments
  • Integrated Marketing: Products & Services, Communications, Channels.
  • Relationship Marketing: Customers, Partners, Channel, Community.
  • Socially Responsible Marketing: Ethics, Environment, Legal.

Integrated Marketing - Marketing Mix (The 4Ps)

  • Product
    • Product variety
    • Quality
    • Design
    • Features
    • Brand name
    • Packaging
    • Sizes
    • Services
    • Warranties
    • Returns
  • Price
    • List price
    • Discounts
    • Allowances
    • Payment period
    • Credit terms
  • Promotion
    • Sales promotion
    • Advertising
    • Sales force
    • Public relations
    • Direct marketing
  • Place
    • Channels
    • Coverage
    • Assortments
    • Locations
    • Inventory
    • Transport

The Nature of Customer Value

  • Customer Value = Perceived Benefits / Perceived Sacrifice
  • Perceived Benefits:
    • Product benefits
    • Service benefits
    • Image benefits
  • Perceived Sacrifice:
    • Monetary costs
    • Time costs
    • Energy costs
    • Psychological costs
  • Source: Jobber and Fahy, 2003, pp. 6-7

Customer Satisfaction

  • Customer satisfaction occurs when perceived performance matches or exceeds expectations.
  • Expectations are formed through pre-buying experiences, discussions with other people, and marketing activities.

The 7Ps of the Extended Marketing Mix

  • Product
  • Price
  • Place
  • Promotion
  • People
  • Processes
  • Physical evidence

Changing Marketing Landscape - Company Perspective

  • Data and Analytics - Marketers leverage the internet for comprehensive market insights.
  • Social media amplifies brand messages and facilitates external communication.
  • Mobile marketing allows reaching consumers on the go.
  • Customised products and targeted ads enhance customer engagement.
  • Companies improve internal processes through internet-based solutions.
  • Cost efficiency is enhanced through skillful internet use and AI.

Changing Marketing Landscape - Consumer Perspective

  • A substantial increase in buying power.
  • A greater variety of available goods and services.
  • A great amount of information about practically anything.
  • Greater ease in interacting and placing and receiving orders.
  • An ability to compare notes on products and services.
  • An amplified voice to influence public opinion.

Three V's Approach to Marketing

  • Define the value segment
  • Define the value proposition
  • Define the value network

The Value Chain

  • The value chain is a tool for identifying ways to create more customer value because every firm is a synthesis of primary and support activities performed to design, produce, market, deliver, and support its product.

Core Business Processes

  • Market-sensing process
  • New-offering realisation process
  • Customer acquisition process
  • Customer relationship management process
  • Fulfillment management process

Core Competency Characteristics

  • It is a source of competitive advantage and makes a significant contribution to customer perceived value.
  • It has applications in a wide variety of markets.
  • It is difficult for competitors to imitate.

A Marketing Plan

  • A marketing plan is the central instrument for directing and coordinating the marketing effort.
  • It operates at a strategic and tactical level.
  • Tactical Aspects:
    • Product features
    • Promotion
    • Merchandising
    • Pricing
    • Sales channels
    • Service
  • Strategic Aspects:
    • Target marketing decisions
    • Value proposition
    • Analysis of marketing opportunities

Vision and Mission Examples

  • Google's Mission: To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
  • IKEA's Mission: To offer a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them.
  • Coca-Cola's Mission: To refresh the world and make a difference.
  • Nike's Mission: To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.
  • Amazon's Mission: To give customers what they want, and get it to them faster than anyone else.
  • Xbox's Mission: To create a gaming experience without barriers that fits the needs of players of all abilities.
  • Philips' Mission: To improve people’s lives through meaningful innovation.
  • Google's Vision: To provide access to the world's information in one click.
  • IKEA's Vision: To create a better everyday life for the many people.
  • Coca-Cola's Vision: To craft the brands and choice of drinks that people love, to refresh them in body and spirit.
  • Nike's Vision: To do everything possible to expand human potential.
  • Sony's Vision: to contribute to the sustainable development of society and that of the environment with which we interact Using our unlimited passion for technology, content and services to. deliver groundbreaking new excitement and entertainment, as only Sony can.
  • Philips' Vision: We are striving to make the world healthier and more sustainable through innovation.

Assessing Growth Opportunities

  • Illustrated by a graph showing sales ($ millions) over time (years), indicating desired sales and current portfolio, with a strategic-planning gap to be filled through intensive, integrative, and diversification growth strategies.

Strategies Suggested by Ansoff's Product-Market Expansion Grid

  • Market Penetration: Current products in current markets.
  • Market Development: Current products in new markets.
  • Product Development: New products in current markets.
  • Diversification: New products in new markets.

Business Unit Strategic Planning

  • Involves defining the business mission and conducting a SWOT analysis.

The Nature and Content of a Marketing Plan

  • Three Main Functions:
    • Describes the company’s goal and proposed course of action.
    • Informs the relevant stakeholders about the goal and action plan.
    • Persuades the relevant decision makers of the viability of the goal and the proposed course of action.
  • Contents of a Marketing Plan:
    • Executive summary and table of contents
    • Situation analysis (context)
    • Marketing strategy (customer, competition, channel, and company strategic approach)
    • Financial projections
    • Implementation controls

The Marketing Environment

  • The marketing environment includes the actors and forces outside marketing that affect marketing management’s ability to build and maintain successful relationships with target customers.
  • Microenvironment: Consists of the actors close to the company that affect its ability to serve its customers—suppliers, distributors, competitors, and customers.
  • Macroenvironment: Consists of the larger societal forces that affect the microenvironment—demographic, economic, natural, technological, political, and socio-cultural forces.

Major Macro Environmental Forces

  • Demographic
  • Economic
  • Ecological
  • Political-Legal
  • Sociocultural
  • Technological

PESTLE Analysis

  • Macro-environment factors to consider in digital marketing: Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental forces.

The Demographic Environment

  • Worldwide population growth
  • Population age mix
  • Ethnic and other markets
  • Educational groups
  • Household patterns

The Economic Environment

  • Income
  • Purchasing Power
  • Debt
  • Prices
  • Savings
  • Consumer Psychology
  • Credit

The Sociocultural Environment

  • Nature
  • Society
  • Organizations
  • Others
  • Universe

The Ecological and Physical Environment

  • The deterioration of the natural environment is a major global problem.
  • In Western Europe, ‘green’ parties have vigorously pressed for public action to reduce industrial pollution.

The Political-Legal Environment

  • Laws
  • Government agencies
  • Pressure groups

The Technological Environment

  • Every new technology is a force for ‘creative destruction’.
  • The number of major new technologies we discover affects the economy’s growth rate.
  • New technology also creates major long-run consequences that are not always foreseeable.

Marketing Research

  • Marketing research is the systematic design, collection, analysis, and reporting of data relevant to a specific marketing situation facing an organization.

Market Research

  • Customer insights are fresh marketing information-based understandings of customers and the marketplace that become the basis for creating customer value, engagement, and relationships.

Developing Marketing Information

  • Marketers obtain information from:
    • Internal data
    • Marketing intelligence
    • Marketing research

Types of Market Research Firms

  1. Syndicated-service research firms
    • These firms gather consumer and trade information, which they sell for a fee.
    • Examples include the Nielsen Company, Euromonitor.
  2. Custom marketing research firms
    • These firms are hired to carry out specific projects.
    • They design the study and report the findings.
  3. Specialty-line marketing research firms
    • These firms provide specialised research services.
    • The best example is the field-service firm, which sells field interviewing services to other firms.

The Market Research Process

  • Define the problem and research objectives
  • Develop the research plan
  • Collect the information
  • Analyse the information
  • Present the findings
  • Make the decision

Types of Research

  • Exploratory Research
    • Sheds light on the problem - suggests solutions or new ideas.
  • Descriptive Research
    • Ascertain magnitudes, quantity demand.
  • Causal Research
    • Test cause-and-effect relationships.
    • Tests hypotheses about cause-and-effect relationships.

Data Sources

  • Primary Data: Data freshly gathered for a specific purpose or for a specific research project.
  • Secondary Data: Data that were collected for another purpose and already exist somewhere.

Research Approaches

  • Observational and ethnographic
  • Focus group
  • Survey
  • Behavioral
  • Experimental

Research Instruments

  • Questionnaires
  • Qualitative Measures
  • Mechanical Devices

Questionnaire Types

  • Dichotomous questions
  • Multiple choice
  • Likert scale
  • Semantic differential
  • Importance scale
  • Rating scale
  • Intention to buy scale
  • Open-ended questions

Step 3: Collect Information

  • The most expensive stage & most prone to error.
  • Problems:
    • Some respondents will not be at home and will need to be re-contacted or replaced
    • Some will refuse to cooperate
    • Some will give biased or dishonest answers
    • Some interviewers will be biased or dishonest

Step 4: Analyze Information

  • The researcher tabulates the data and develops statistics or themes to make sense of the data manually or by using excel, spss or some other software package e.g., NVivo.

Step 5: Present Findings

  • Present findings relevant to the major marketing decisions

Step 6: Make the Decision

  • The client/business who commissioned the research needs to either use the research or not. Or do more research.

STP Marketing Model

  • Segmentation: Divide market into distinct groups of customers (segments).
  • Targeting: Select most attractive segments to focus your marketing on.
  • Positioning: Determine how to position your product for each target segment.

Market Segmentation

  • Market segmentation requires dividing a market into smaller segments with common needs, characteristics, or behaviors.
  • By segmenting markets, companies can examine growth opportunities and expand their product lines.
  • In many markets, companies are not able to compete across all segments effectively; by segmenting markets, companies can identify which segments they might most effectively compete in and develop strategies suited for that segment.

Geographic Segmentation

  • Geographic segmentation calls for dividing the market into different geographical units such as nations, regions, states, counties, cities, neighborhoods, population density (urban, suburban, rural), or climate.
  • A company decides to operate in one or a few geographic areas, or operate in all areas but pay attention to geographical differences in needs and wants.

Demographic Segmentation

  • Age
  • Gender
  • Family Life Cycle
  • Income
  • Education
  • Religion
  • Socio-Economic status

Psychographic Segmentation

  • Values
  • Attitudes
  • Opinion
  • Activity
  • Interest
  • Behavior

Behavioral Segmentation

  • Behavioral segmentation divides a market into segments based on consumer knowledge, attitudes, uses of a product, or responses to a product.
    • Occasions
    • Benefits sought
    • User status
    • Usage rate
    • Loyalty status

Advantages of Segmentation

  1. Helps distinguish one customer group from another within a given market.
  2. Facilitates proper choice of target market.
  3. Facilitates effective tapping of the market.
  4. Helps divide the markets and conquer them.
  5. Helps crystallize the needs of the target buyers.
  6. Makes the marketing effort more efficient and economic.

Effective Market Segmentation

  1. Measurability: In terms of size and purchasing power.
  2. Accessibility: Reached and served through suitable means of distribution of promotion.
  3. Substantiality: Large and profitable.
  4. Differentiability: Clearly distinguishable.
  5. Actionability: To be effective, makers of segmentation should be compatible with the manpower, financial, and managerial resources.

Target Marketing Strategies

  • Undifferentiated Marketing
  • Differentiated Marketing
  • Concentrated Marketing
  • Customized Marketing

Criteria for Choosing a Target Marketing Strategy

  • Company resources
  • Product variability
  • Product life-cycle stage
  • Market variability
  • Competitor’s marketing strategies

Positioning Strategies

  1. UNIQUE SELLING PROPOSITION
  2. DUAL BENEFIT POSITIONING
    • Product features
    • Services attributes
    • Channel attributes
    • Pricing attributes
    • Product Benefits
    • Other attributes

Developing a Positioning Strategy

  • Points-of-parity (POPs)
  • Points-of-difference (PODs)

The Perceptual Map

  • The perceptual map is a useful tool for determining the position of a brand in the marketplace.
  • The key steps in producing a perceptual map are:
    • Identify a set of competing brands;
    • Identify the important attributes consumers use when choosing between brands;
    • Conduct quantitative marketing research where consumers score each brand on all key attributes;
    • Plot brands on a two-dimensional map.

What are Services?

  • Any act or performance one party can offer to another that is essentially intangible and does not result in the ownership of anything; its production may or may not be tied to a physical product.

Definition of Services

  • Services:
    • are economic activities offered by one party to another
    • most commonly employ time-based performances to bring about desired results
  • In exchange for their money, time, and effort, service customers expect to obtain value from
    • access to goods, labor, facilities, environments, professional skills, networks, and systems;
    • normally do not take ownership of any of the physical elements involved.

Service Characteristics

  • Intangibility
  • Inseparability
  • Variability
  • Perishability

Branding to Make Tangible

  • Corporate brand one of the main ways to build customer trust
  • Service brands need to develop clear set of values
  • Use physical cues to communicate the brand to the consumer
  • Package design / design of physical facilities in services represents an opportunity for differentiation
  • Tangible elements surrounding the brand can serve to facilitate the service performance
  • Tangible elements of a service brand encourage and discourage particular types of consumer behaviour

Extended Marketing Mix for Services (7Ps)

  • Product
  • Price
  • Place
  • Promotion
  • People
  • Process
  • Physical evidence

Managing Service Quality

  • Customer switching behavior factors
    • Pricing
    • Inconvenience
    • Core service failure
    • Service encounter failures
    • Response to service failure
    • Competition
    • Ethical problems
    • Involuntary switching

Dimensions of Service Quality

  • Reliability
  • Tangibles
  • Responsive
  • Empathy
  • Assurance

Understanding Customers

  • What are their choice criteria?
  • Who is important?
  • Where do they buy?
  • When do they buy?
  • How do they buy?
  • The answers to these questions can be derived from personal contact with customers and, increasingly, by employing marketing research.

Roles in the Consumer Buyer Decision-Making Process

  • Initiator
  • Influencer
  • Decider (Decision Maker)
  • Buyer
  • User

How Do They Buy? - Consumer Decisions

  • Consumer decisions can be broken down into 4 types:

The Buyer Decision-Making Process

  • Need recognition
  • Information search
  • Evaluation of alternatives
  • Purchase decision
  • Postpurchase behavior

Developing a Value Proposition

  • Create value across 3 domains:
    • Functional value
    • Psychological value
    • Monetary value

Developing a Positioning Strategy

  • Positioning – The act of designing a company’s offering and image to occupy a distinctive place in the minds of the target market

Points of Difference

  • Points of difference (PODs): Attributes/benefits that consumers strongly associate with a brand, positively evaluate, and believe they could not find to the same extent with a competitive brand
  • POD criteria:
    • Desirable – Relevance, Distinctiveness, Believeability
    • Deliverable – Feasibility, Communicability, Sustainability
    • Differentiating

Points of Parity

  • Points of parity (POPs): Attribute/benefit associations that are not necessarily unique to the brand but may in fact be shared with other brands
  • POP forms:
    • Category
    • Correlational
    • Competitive

Creating a Sustainable Advantage

  • Three core strategies:
    • Differentiate on an existing attribute
    • Introduce a new attribute
    • Build a strong brand

Bases and Strategies for Positioning

  • The Quality Positioning
  • The Value/Price Positioning
  • The Benefit Positioning
  • The Demographic Positioning
  • The Competitor Positioning
  • The cultural symbol positioning

Business Market Definition

  • Consists of all the organizations that acquire goods and services used in the production of other products or services that are sold, rented, or supplied to others

Business Market Characteristics

  • Fewer, larger buyers
  • Close supplier–customer relationships
  • Professional purchasing
  • Multiple buying influences
  • Multiple sales calls
  • Derived demand
  • Inelastic demand
  • Fluctuating demand
  • Geographically concentrated buyers
  • Direct purchasing

Product Classifications

  • Convenience Products
    • Staples, Impulse, Emergency
    • E.g. Toothpaste, chocolate, umbrellas
  • Shopping Products
    • E.g. Furniture, Clothing, Household Appliances
  • Specialty Products
    • E.g. specific car brands, luxury goods
  • Unsought Products
    • E.g. New Innovations, Life Assurance.
  • Organizational Products
    • E.g. B2B Products and Services, High tech, materials, components, plant and equipment.

Three Levels of a Product

  • Product differentiation can take place at any of these 3 levels
  • Core benefit
  • Actual product
  • Augmented product
  • Differentiate on an existing attribute
  • Introduce a new attribute
  • Build a strong brand

The Product Life Cycle

  • Four stages: introduction, growth, maturity, and decline.

Product Market Growth Framework & Market Opportunities (Ansoff Matrix)

  • Market Penetration: Current products, current customers.
  • Market Development: Current products, new customers.
  • Product Development: New products, current customers.
  • Diversification: New products, new customers.

PLC Characteristics, Objectives, Strategies

  • Introduction
    • Characteristics: Low sales, High cost per unit/ customer, Negative profits, Innovators for customers, Few competitors.
    • Marketing Objectives: Create product awareness and trial.
  • Growth
    • Rapidly rising sales, Average cost per unit/customer, Rising profits, Early adopters for customers, Growing number of competitors.
    • Marketing Objectives: Maximize market share.
  • Maturity
    • Peak sales, Low cost per unit/ customer, High profits, Mainstream for customers, Large number of competitors.
    • Marketing Objectives: Maximize profit while defending market share.
  • Decline
    • Declining sales, Low cost per unit/ customer, Declining profits, Laggards for customers, Declining number of competitors.
    • Marketing Objectives: Reduce expenditure and harvest the market.
  • Strategies for each stage related to product, price, communications, and distribution.

What is a Brand?

  • A brand is a name, term, sign, symbol, or design, or a combination of them, intended to identify the goods or services of one seller or a group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competitors (American Marketing Association, 2014).

Benefits of Brands to Organizations

  • Company Value
  • Consumer Preference and Loyalty
  • Barrier to Competition
  • High Profits
  • Base for Brand Extensions

Benefits of Brands to Consumers

  • COMMUNICATE FEATURES AND BENEFITS
  • REDUCE THE RISK IN PURCHASING
  • SIMPLIFY THE PURCHASE DECISION
  • PROVIDE SYMBOLIC VALUE

Understanding Pricing

  • Traditionally, price has operated as a major determinant of buyer choice
  • E-commerce and digital transformation has been changed the way buyers and sellers interact.
  • The internet has enabled buyers to make instant price comparisons from thousands of vendors.
  • Using smart mobile devices, customers can easily make price comparisons in stores before deciding whether to purchase, pressure the retailer to match or better the price, or buy elsewhere.
  • Using promotional platforms such as Groupon/Pigsback/Luxury Breaks, customers can also pool their resources to get better pricing

Consumer Psychology and Pricing

  • Reference prices
  • Image pricing
  • Price cues

The Pricing Objective and Strategies

  • Short-term profit
  • Market penetration
  • Market skimming (Tech/electronics etc.)
  • Quality leadership
  • Premium pricing: High price now, high price in the future.
  • Penetration pricing: Low price now, high price in the future.
  • Pricing skimming: High price now, low price in the future.
  • Loss leader: Low price now, low price in the future.

Determining Demand

  • Price elasticity of demand
    • The degree to which a change in price leads to a change in quantity sold.
    • Each price will lead to a different level of demand and have a different impact on a company’s marketing objectives.
    • Broadly price elasticity is low when:
      • The product is distinctive and there are few or no substitutes or competitors
      • Consumers do not readily notice the higher price
      • Consumers are slow to change their buying habits
      • Consumers think the higher prices are justified by factors such as the cost of creating the product, product scarcity, and government taxation
      • The expenditure is a smaller part of the buyer’s total income or of the total cost of the end product; and
      • Part or all of the cost is borne by another party

Incentives as a Marketing Device

  • Incentives
    • Sales promotion tools, mostly short-term, designed to stimulate quicker or greater purchase of particular products or services by consumers or the trade
  • Sales promotions:
    • Can produce a high sales response in the short run but little permanent gain over the longer term
    • Can prompt consumers to engage in stockpiling
    • Can devalue the company’s offering in buyers’ minds

Marketing Communications

  • The means by which firms attempt to inform, persuade, and remind consumers—directly or indirectly—about the products and brands they sell.
  • Represent the voice of the company and its brands.
  • A means by which the firm can establish a dialogue and build relationships with consumers.

The Communication Process

  • Sender encodes a message, transmits it through media, to a receiver who decodes the message and provides feedback, all within a context of noise.

The New Marketing Communications Model

  • Factors changing today’s marketing communications:
    • Consumers are changing.
    • Marketing strategies are changing.
    • Advances in digital technology

The Marcomms Mix

  • Advertising
  • Mobile communication
  • Events and experiences
  • Public relations and publicity
  • Packaging
  • Personal selling
  • Online and social media marketing
  • Direct marketing
  • Word of mouth

The Promotion Mix

  • The promotion mix is the specific blend of promotion tools that the company uses to persuasively communicate customer value and build customer relationships.
  • Advertising
  • Sales Promotion
  • Personal Selling
  • Public Relations
  • Direct and Digital Marketing

Social Networks

  • Means for consumers to share text, images, audio, and video information with each other and with companies, and vice versa
  • Online brand communities/forums
  • Blogs
  • Social networks
  • Social media are rarely the sole source of marketing communications for a brand
  • Only some consumers want to engage with some brands, and, even then, only some of the time

Influencer Marketing

  • Influencer marketing is about product placement or endorsement on social media networks through an influencer. An influencer is a person with a social following and who focuses on a particular niche.
  • Influencer marketing helps Companys gain reach in a targeted audience or niche. Using it as part of their social media strategy can drive campaign performance to increase brand awareness, generate leads and boost sales.
  • Fortune Business Insights reports that the global influencer marketing platform market size was valued at 17.4017.40 billion in 2023.
  • By 2032, that figure is expected to reach 7171 billion.

Types of Influencers

  • Mega Influencer
  • Macro Influencer
  • Micro Influencer and creator
  • Nano Influencer and creators

Online Brand Communities

  • Online Brand Communities and Forums come in all shapes and sizes. Many are created by consumers or groups of consumers with no commercial interests or company affiliations.
  • Others are sponsored by companies whose members communicate with the company and with each other through postings, text messaging, and chat discussions about special interests related to the company’s products and brands.

Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC)

  • Unifying all marketing actions over a diversity of available channels.
  • A consistent and cohesive process of integrating all marketing communications practices to the relevant audience creating a cohesive message to clients about a service, a product or a brand (Pikton and Broderick 2005).
  • All fragmented parts must be well connected, personalised and customer-oriented.
  • It has to have relevant content to the target audience and be within clear marketing communications objectives, congruent with all the company's objectives.
  • It is responsible for internal and external communicative actions and activities to make sure the right message is being sent.
  • Integration is not simple to be achieved and companies need much more than a clear message, consistency, or concepts of images.
  • IMC concerns both communications which are part of a pre-existing marketing plan, and also unplanned customer communication.

Integrated Marketing Communications - Consistent Message

  • Carefully blended mix of promotion tools
    • Advertising
    • Sales promotion
    • Personal selling
    • Public relations
    • Direct and digital marketing
  • Consistent, clear, and compelling company and brand messages

Managing Integrated Marketing Communications

  • Horizontal integration: Coordinating all relevant marketing actions—including packaging, pricing, sales promotions, and distribution—with the communication campaign to achieve maximum customer impact
  • Vertical integration: Aligning the communication objectives with the higher-level goals that guide the company’s overarching marketing strategy.
  • Internal integration: Sharing the relevant information from different departments—including product development, market research, sales, and customer service—with the communication team to create an effective and cost-efficient campaign.
  • External integration: Co-ordinates a company’s communication activities with those of the external collaborators—including advertising, social media, and public relations agencies; event organisers; and campaign co-sponsors.

Ensuring Communications Integration

  • Coverage: the proportion of the audience reached by each communication option employed, as well as the amount of overlap among those options.
  • Contribution: the inherent ability of a marketing communication to elicit the desired response from consumers, and to exert communication effects on them, in the absence of exposure to any other communication option.
  • Commonality: the extent to which common associations are reinforced across communication options—that is, the extent to which different communication options share the same meaning.

More on Ensuring Communications Integration

  • Complementarity: Communication options are often more effective when used in tandem. Complementarity involves emphasising different associations and linkages across communication options.
  • Conformability: reflects the extent to which a marketing communication option works for both groups of consumers (new vs. familiar).
  • Cost: Marketers must evaluate marketing communications on all these criteria against their cost to arrive at the most effective and most efficient communications programme needed to communicate its performance advantages.

Stages in Developing Effective Marketing Communication

  1. Identify the target audience
  2. Determine the communication objectives
  3. Design the message
  4. Choose the media to